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Joint SPECOM 2017 and ICR 2017 Conference

The 19th International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2017) and the 2nd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics (ICR 2017) will be jointly held in Hatfield, Hertfordshire on 12-16 September 2017.

SPECOM has been established as one of the major international scientific events in the areas of speech technology and human-machine interaction over the last 20 years. It attracts scientists and engineers from several European, American and Asian countries and every year the Programme Committee consists of internationally recognized experts in speech technology and human-machine interaction of diverse countries and Institutes, which ensure the scientific quality of the proceedings.

Since last year, SPECOM is jointly organised with ICR conference extending the interest also to human-robot interaction. This year the joint conferences will have 3 Special Sessions co-organised by academic institutes from Europe, USA, Asia and Australia.

Special Session 1: Natural Language Processing for Social Media Analysis

The exploitation of natural language from social media data is an intriguing task in the fields of text mining and natural language processing (NLP), with plenty of applications in social sciences and social media analytics. In this special session, we call for research papers in the broader field of NLP techniques for social media analysis. The topics of interest include (but are not limited to): sentiment analysis in social media and beyond (e.g., stance identification, sarcasm detection, opinion mining), computational sociolinguistics (e.g., identification of demographic information such as gender, age), and NLP tools for social media mining (e.g., topic modeling for social media data, text categorization and clustering for social media).

Multilingual speech processing has been an active topic for many years. Over the last few years, the availability of big data in a vast variety of languages and the convergence of speech recognition and synthesis approaches to statistical parametric techniques (mainly deep learning neural networks) have put this field in the center of research interest, with a special attention for low- or even zero-resourced languages. In this special session, we call for research papers in the field of multilingual speech processing. The topics include (but are not limited to): multilingual speech recognition and understanding, dialectal speech recognition, cross-lingual adaptation, text-to-speech synthesis, spoken language identification, speech-to-speech translation, multi-modal speech processing, keyword spotting, emotion recognition and deep learning in speech processing.

Special Session 3: Real-Life Challenges in Voice and Multimodal Biometrics

Complex passwords or cumbersome dongles are now obsolete. Biometric technology offers a secure and user friendly solution to authenticate and have been employed in various real-life scenarios. This special session seeks to bring together researchers, professionals, and practitioners to present and discuss recent developments and challenges in Real-Life applications of biometrics. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Delegates’ profile

Speech technology, human-machine interaction and human-robot interaction attract a multidisciplinary group of students and scientists from computer science, signal processing, machine learning, linguistics, social sciences, natural language processing, text mining, dialogue systems, affective modelling, interactive interfaces, collaborative and social robotics, intelligent and adaptive systems. The estimated number of delegates which will attend the Joint SPECOM and ICR conferences is approximately 150 participants.

Who should sponsor:

Research Organisations

Universities and Research Labs

Research and Innovation Projects

Academic Publishers

Innovative Companies

Sponsorship Levels

Based on different sponsorship levels, sponsors will be able to disseminate their research, innovation and/or commercial activities by distributed leaflets/brochures and/or by 3 days booths, in common area with the coffee breaks and poster sessions.

Location

The joint SPECOM and ICR conferences will be held in the College Lane Campus of the University of Hertfordshire, in Hatfield. Hatfield is located 20 miles (30 kilometres) north of London and is connected to the capital via the A1(M) and direct trains to London King’s Cross (20 minutes), Finsbury Park (16 minutes) and Moorgate (35 minutes). It is easily accessible from 3 international airports (Luton, Stansted and Heathrow) via public transportation.

“The overall emphasis of the workshop is on the contribution of cognitive science to language processing, including conceptualisation, representation, discourse processing, meaning construction, ontology building, and text mining.”

This year’s 8th International NLPCS Workshop just took place this weekend in Copenhagen, Denmark (20-21 Aug 2011). The Workshop topic was: “Human-Machine Interaction in Translation“, focussing on all aspects of human and machine translation, and human-computer interaction in translation, including: translators’ experiences with CAT tools, human-machine interface design, evaluation of interactive machine translation, user simulation and human factors. Thus, the topics were approached from a number of different perspectives: